Democratic Hospitalities: national borders and the impossibility of the other for democracy

Abstract

This paper is interested in looking at the similarities and differences in the work of Agamben and Derrida. Agamben‘s work on sovereign power and “bare life” has been taken up extensively in critical theory as a way of understanding the on-going violence of state-centric “liberal democratic” regimes of government. Here, I endeavor to draw out the implications of Agamben‘s theory for understandings of democracy and hospitality. Following this, I compare such ideas with the deconstructive approach advanced by Derrida. Derrida‘s writings offer a far more complex and aporetic understanding of hospitality, which insist on the unknown and the unforeseeable, as well as a conception of equality irreducible to calculation or numbers. In Rogues, Derrida poses the following question: “does this measure of the immeasurable, this democratic equality, end at citizenship, and thus at the borders of the nation-state? Or should we extend it to . . . the whole world of humans assumed to be like me . . . ?” (53) This essay will attempt to engage with this vital question via a theoretical exploration of Derrida‘s work on “democracy” and “hospitality”. A series of questions motivate my analysis: how do democracy and hospitality operate together conceptually? How can Derrida’s works intervene in debates about asylum seekers, refugees and immigration in Australia? How can we give something back to a hospitality and democracy that has been hijacked by neo-liberal, neo-conservative agendas and discourse?